Even Dawkins doesn’t claim God is impossible—that’d be category 7 on his “strong theist–strong atheist” scale.
Certainly there must have been other interesting things in my various posts that it would be possible to reply to 
? Seriously, how do you think it possible to claim that faith can mean anything but blind faith in the context of belief in God?
Anyway, Dawkins may not think it’s impossible for God to exist, but that’s because he’s a smart scientist who does not rule out anything that he cannot rule out scientifically. But I’d wager he thinks God is not impossible in the same way he thinks the Flying Spaghetti Monster is not impossible (not the Invisible Pink Unicorn, though – that’s truly impossible).
It can mean faith that is based on reasons for believing in God. I hesitate to get into personal reasons for belief in God in this thread since Dawkins doesn’t discuss really the issue in his book. Chapter 3 addresses arguments for believing in God—the kinds of things a person might say to attempt to convince someone else that God exists, the kinds of things you might find in a philosophical work—but not bases for faith in God—the personal reasons a person might have for believing in God, the kinds of things you might find in a spiritual autobiography. There’s some overlap, but only some.
I suppose you could say that there are two kinds of religious believers: those whose beliefs are examined and those whose beliefs are unexamined. The unexamined believers believe because they’ve been taught to believe, and they haven’t thought to question. Their belief system works for them (or, if it doesn’t, they don’t realize that it doesn’t). I think it would be fair to call their faith “blind faith.” But those who have seriously considered the issue, and who believe, for any of various reasons, that God is real (or even, that God is in relationship with them, that God is at work in their lives, that they are personally acquainted with God at least a little), I would not say their faith was blind faith, even if it turns out the reasons they have for believing are in fact mistaken.
That’s interesting. I’m not sure I agree, but I’m finding it difficult to come to terms with it. I think I’d argue that if, after consideration, you conclude that God is real, since you do have evidence of his reality, you would still have a blind faith in that ultimate conclusion; but I see where the definition of what “blindness” means in this context is debatable. I’m almost afraid the issue boils down to the unhappy state where I say it’s blind because you still have to assume a hell of a lot, and you (or whoever, I don’t really know your stance, afterall) say it’s not blind because you’ve weighed those assumptions carefully.
Thanks for the reply, anyhoo.
I think I would categorise it as the “leap of faith”; the idea being that a religious person does not entirely have all the evidence to support their conclusion, but that they must make a leap from the position their evidence would suggest to their point of belief.
IOW, that religious people are certain of their religion’s correctness, but that they themselves do not believe the evidence means they should be certain. Obviously this is IMHO and a guess at that.
I realize that as far as discussing chapter six on the origins of morality, I’m coming late to the party. Some of my thoughts have already been voiced, but here are some additional ones.
Like I said in my first post in this thread, I find Dawkins at his best when dealing with biology, and getting worse the farther he roams into other topics. When I read chapter six, I found it filled with so many fallacies and contradictions that I barely know how to respond or where to begin. So if the following posts seem jumbled or incoherent, I apologize in advance.
Dawkins begins chapter six with a presentation of the possible Darwinian origin of our moral sense. I’ve already explained why I don’t accept the idea of Darwinism applied to behavior, and I won’t repeat that here. I will say, as I said in our thread on The Abolition of Man, that I don’t see the argument as useful even if the science were valid. It’s difficult to imagine anyone standing up on the floor of the Senate and arguing for a law because of morality derived from the behavior of Arabian babblers. The fundamental argument does not satisfy; most people demand a deeper metaphysical basis for their moral system.
Next Dawkins takes us through the series of moral situations involving trains, switches, and various numbers of people dieing. He says that surveys found similar judgements in these situations, even among a primitive tribe in the Amazon. I’ll admit I find that result quite surprising, yet he’s still a long way from proof that morality depends on genetics. To take the three crimes he lists, many people do commit murder, rape, and robbery. Moreover, the prevalence of those crimes varies quite a bit from place to place and time to time. In some primitive societies murder was commonplace, rape was the standard sexual practice, and robbery was a way of life. Hence one of two things must be true: either we have no genes affecting our morality, or we have those genes but can override them. In either case, Darwinian arguments alone cannot provide our society’s basis for morality.
But there is an even more blatantly obvious argument against depending on the genetic basis of morality. Dawkins argued earlier that we have a genetic disposition to follow the religious teachings of our parents, yet he plainly wants us to do the opposite. Now he argues that we have a genetic disposition to be nice and generous to each other, and therefore we must do so. In short, he says we are obligated to obey some of our genes and disobey others. One might well ask, how do we know which ones to obey and which ones to disobey? Why shouldn’t we obey our religious genes, or disobey our charitable genes, or both? (And keep in mind there’s no proof that either set of genes exists.)
There’s one more point that I have to make on the behavior genes. Obviously Dawkins is not the first person to argue for certain morals based on Darwinian grounds. The argument has been circling for more than a century. But while that line of thinking has been around for so long, no consensus has developed as to what our genes are commanding. While Dawkins believes that our genes say “be generous”, others think they say “be selfish”. Some say that our genes push us to be peaceful, others say they push us to be warlike. Some claim there’s a genetic reason for men to rule society, others say there’s a genetic reason for women to rule. While it could be that in each case one side is right and the other wrong, I see a simpler explanation. People know what moral system they want, and they project it onto their genes. Theories about our genes and behavior tell us more about the theorizer than about the genes.
I think you misunderstood Dawkin’s position. He is not arguing that we should be good because of our genes, he is arguing that we are (mostly) good because of our genes. I think this is one of the most interesting sections of the book, but also one the weakest because it’s so speculative. It’s only relevant because some people like C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity argue that our sense of morality must come from a spiritual realm. I think their are lots of naturalistic explanations for why we all have a sense of morality. I suspect we have a genetic predisposition for it, like our predisposition for language, but that the content is mostly cultural. Dawkins makes some interesting points, though.
I don’t believe he does say we should be moral because of our genetics. He’s arguing that our morals may have developed from our genetics, but that is not the reason for following them, it’s just the reason why they’re there.
Here’s my take on the physical nature of consciousness. I am not an expert in neuroscience by any standard, but based on what I know, we haven’t few firm conclusions about what consciousness actually is. Humanity has made huge leaps in understanding the physical world, from the subatomic level to distant galaxies, but the human mind has been very grudging about giving up its secrets. One lecturer I recall once put it thusly: “Five thousand years of human investigation has yet to turn up anything that meets the description of ‘the mind’.” (The speaker, by the way, was Simon Penny, who is both an artist and a professor of computer science, and has written some fascinating articles on a variety of topics. His books are highly recommended.)
Hence I’ll put my views like this. Consciousness exists not purely as a physical thing. It has physical components, but also something more to it. The lower functions may be purely physical, but higher ones exist at the level of mind. The higher functions of the mind cannot be quantitized or measured, because the only ways to have awareness of them is to experience them. A person who experiences something at the mind’s highest levels can’t exactly duplicate it for another person. The means of human communication–or at least the ordinary means–aren’t adequate for expressing an experience of that type. Hence there’s no way to measure it. How would you compare amounts of transcendence between two individuals?
On this thread’s first page, Alan Smithee already responded to my argument about art by saying that an artistic experience is all in the head, and thus tells us nothing about reality outside. Well, obviously I disagree. I believe that all the modes of experience (which I listed in my first post) can bring information from the “outside” rather than just “in the head”.
Consider that to one with a completely reductionist attitude, any thinking at all is only physical activity in the brain. Even the perception that the grass is green only means that certain neurons are firing in certain ways. Anyone who wants to avoid total absurdity has to believe that the thought does correspond to the outside reality. And if you’re able to believe that much, you should at least be able to understand how that idea could be carried further.
Alan’s other objection was that there was no way of knowing whether artistic reactions were “right”. I’d say, with all due respect that such an approach is entirely wrong. In any serious field of thought, demanding that everything be either right or wrong is a simplistic style of thinking that only allows one to tackle the most basic parts of the field.
Could you be more specific? What do you believe artistic experience tells us about the world? How do we determine it? How do we get to even the “most basic part” or it? What “higher functions of the mind” do you believe are non-physical? Why?
I think it makes sense that some aspects of consciousness should be difficult or impossible to explain, since we’re asking a physical system (the brain) to study and model itself. That we have gaps, even significant gaps, in explaining consciousness doesn’t imply to me that there is anything non-physical, or even particularly strange, going on in the head.
Interesting that you should mention pragmatism, as its influence plays a significant role in my own atheism. First, from your link:
so pragmatism would not support conflating the two ideas or favoring desirability of belief over the truth, i.e., predictive power of the belief.
Second, I have never heard a convincing answer to the question “How would a world with a god differ from a world without a god?” What is the predictive power of the existence of a deity? The answers that I get either indicate that there probably is not a god (the world with a god would b 6,000 years old) or deny any difference (god is outside of science). Given this, I can’t see any reason to believe that a deity exists.*
I agree that we’re still a long way away from a real theory of mind. Part of the problem is that no appropriate technology existed for most of those 5,000 years. We have certainly made progress in ruling out many proposed theories of mind, and fields like psychology and neuroscience have shed light on innumerable facets of our minds that are simply not available to introspection. An equally significant reason that we have no theory of mind is that many are unwilling to formulate the question in a way that permits an answer. If consciousness is to be explained, not explained away, it must happen in terms of things that are at least not wholly conscious. We must abandon the idea of a unitary soul. This seems to be supported by the evidence of science since psychology has discovered that we are at time unaware of our own biases, past beliefs, motivations and even qualia. For example, here is an article suggesting that bodily movements can help us solve problems without our knowledge, even when we believe that the movements distracted us.
Sorry for the long aside, but I still believe that Dawkins’ work is not the appropriate response to a theist such as yourself. If you’re interested in one philosopher’s (Daniel Dennett’s) approach to a theory of mind here is Part 1 of an hour long lecture on consciousness, or this 24 minute lecture that covers most of the same ground somewhat quickly but has the advantage of having some interesting examples near the end.
Regarding the issue of measurement: historically is has been happened that quantification methods are developed alongside our theoretical understanding of a subject. Mathematically it turns out that measurement is quite a bit more subtle than one might suspect. For example, the field of topology describes what occurs when we lose a numeric concept of distance entirely. Reproducibility by transferring experiences from one to another may be impossible for perfectly mundane reasons, likely because the elements of the brain interact strongly enough to make the problem computationally infeasible. Other methods of reproducing results are certainly available, the most obvious of which involves brain scanners, that can show correlations and perhaps even causation. The point is: if external observers can tell us things about our consciousness that we do not know, why should we be convinced that the first person perspective must be deeply mysterious?
I’ll show some of my pragmatist influence here. We perceive the grass as green because the model of reality that includes things like “grass” and “green” has proved over time to explain the sensory data we have and successfully predict new data. As we investigated further it turned out that the notions of “grass” and “green” could be meaningfully applied to our botanical and optical studies, and so our belief of their reality was bolstered.
*You may wonder why I call myself an atheist rather than an agnostic. I did call myself an agnostic of some time, but when I realized that I don’t act as if I believe in God I decided that I might as well be honest with myself.
I would say it very much depends on what you’d call “the mind”. It seems like in this context what you’re referring to is that part of you that you would call “I”; your self. Because I would say that while we certainly haven’t mapped the whole thing, we do have a reasonable idea of what parts do what. Mainly through lesion studies we can see that damage to some parts of the brain will relatively uniformly affect people in similar ways, and affect that thing which we would call “self”. Cut the connections between the hemispheres and you can get symptoms which seem very much like the “creation” of a second being with higher brain functions.
And hey, after all, Mr. Penny may be a smart guy, but it was five thousand years of human investigation before we knew anything about the composition of the moon. That doesn’t mean it’s made of cheese. 
Well, first off i’d say that lack of knowledge doesn’t imply that it’s not there to be found. If your only evidence is that we don’t know for certain it’s the case, i’m not sure how you’re so certain that you are correct in your views. I mean, i’m happy to consider the possibility of a self that’s not entirely physical; I just don’t see why I should move from possibility to agreement on it.
And I would say that study of the brain is still important, even if were just a communication device between the senses and the trancendent self. If we can replicate the signals from senses, that would show that the trancedent self can be manipulated by the physical. It would be interesting (to me, anyway) to find out just how much the self does depend on the brain, to what extent we can manipulate the self by manipulating the brain. At the very least, you should be interested in such research in case it gives evidence against brain = mind theories, as you believe it would.
I agree.
I am such a reductionist, and I certainly believe that. Carried further how?
I agree with you again, but I question your choice of the Abolition, since Lewis appeared to make exactly that claim within it.
Moving to chapter nine now, I’ll just say that this was my least favorite chapter in the book because Dawkins is being so slippery. He quotes Humphrey as saying that parents should not be allowed to teach children certain religious beliefs (including ones that are widely believed) and he seems to approve. Yet Dawkins leaves himself just enough wiggle room to claim that he never advocated having society to take over child-raising by force. The question of what Dawkins really believes is just hanging there. He says that Amish children shouldn’t be removed from high school and that a certain college in England shouldn’t be allowed to teach the literal truth of Genesis, but those are fringe cases. What would he actually advocate for normal, mainstream religious families?
In any cases, Dawkins began by lamenting that so few Americans would be willing to elect an atheist as President. This chapter certainly won’t build up anyone’s confidence that some practicing his brand of atheism would strongly defend our freedoms.
I don’t interpret it this way at all. While I don’t hear the phrase “a Christian child”, I would interpret it as meaning exactly what he complains about: a child who is a Christian. Dawkins says it’s impossible for a child to know what Christian doctrine means. I disagree, because I’ve met children who do so.
A friend of mine has a seven-year-old son, Bernie. One day she found him saying prayers in front of a potted iris bulb that had recently sprouted. She asked why, and Bernie replied that the bulb reminded him of Jesus, since it had initially appeared dead but had now come to life. So Bernie understood that the central tenet of Christianity is the resurrection, which many adults can’t seem to grasp. (Indeed, nothing in this book indicates that Dawkins himself grasps it.)
This entire chapter smacks of the modern attitude that children’s main role is as potential victims. There are many movements that use the supposed vulnerability of children as a wedge to gain control over the behavior of adults. Dawkins may be thinking that since it worked against tobacco, it should work against Christianity as well. Whatever he’s thinking, I don’t think he’s thought it through very well.
Dawkins defends himself by saying that he would teach children only how to think, not what to think. I don’t know whether he has children of his own, but I’d guess not. This statement is just too naïve to hold water with someone who’s actually done educating of children. The early stages of education have to consist of teaching kids what to believe. That’s what their minds can absorb, and they need a framework of facts before they can learn how to synthesize and evaluate. Moreover, since there are obvious disagreements about how we should think, teaching children methods of thinking still involves giving them values. There’s no avoiding it.
As I’ve said before, I was raised by atheists, attended America’s very secular public schools, and had next to zero religious education. I now regret all these facts deeply. I can see that this upbringing left me unprepared for much of adulthood, taught me bad attitudes, gave me unbalanced priorities, separated me from my heritage, and told me many flat-out lies. From my adult perspective, though, I try not to be bitter, and you certainly won’t see me demanding that parents be forced to teach what I want them to teach.
I don’t see that as a problem at all, to be honest. He thinks that kids shouldn’t be taught religious beliefs, but he also thinks that it shouldn’t be enforced. Perfectly reasonable. I think that people shouldn’t smoke - yet I am far from wanting a ban on it. I don’t think that people should do huge amounts of pot, who sleep with everyone in sight, or eat horribly unhealthy food. And yet I don’t want to enforce a ban on any of those things either.
Your confidence, perhaps. I see being against something but not to the extent of banning it outright to be a pretty reasonable and indeed common opinion. I’m sure you’d like most people to share your Christianity - but I would never accuse you of wanting it to be mandatory (well, making the rituals mandatory, anyway). There’s a clear line of difference - I don’t see it as one requiring “wiggle room”.
I could turn your story around, and say that Bernie didn’t understand Christian doctrine since he didn’t understand that Jesus’ resurrection was a one-time thing. That he didn’t understand it because Jesus actually did die.
I would point out also that Dawkins’ point is not only that children are less likely to fully understand doctrine, they’re also more likely to just accept it. When you’re a kid, you do just tend to accept what you’re told. Look at yourself for an example of that. Would it have been fair for me to call you an “atheist child”, given that you lacked knowledge in all those areas of religion? I wouldn’t say so.
Plenty of people on these very boards have said that they teach their children that their particular beliefs are just one way of looking at the world, and that they could be wrong. At the very least, there is a significant difference between “These are the facts of the matter; you don’t need to look at all these other things” as your own upbringing might be characterised as, and “This is what I think, this is what other people think”, or even “This is what I think - but if you want to, I can teach you about anything you care to ask about”.
I don’t believe you’ll see Dawkins demanding that either - I think you’ve considerably blurred a line that doesn’t need to be blurred there. One may think something is bad without wanting it banned quite easily, and I am sure that there are many things that you personally would put in that category.
I dunno that you’ve said it before, but you blame all that on atheism? Really? In your adult perspective, you caught bad attitudes and unbalanced priorities because of atheism? What’s atheism done?
Incidentally, ITR champion, if you’d be so kind I’d still be interested in the answer to my question of January 12th, to wit: what the heck is the spiritual realm, how do you know it exists, and how would you go about proving that?
I disliked the chapter although I agree with the idea, simply because I don’t believe he should single out religion. Parents instill in their children all kinds of lunacies and all kinds of personal opinions that an ideal world would let the children discover for themselves. Politics, concepts of race, gender, and sex, all that could be discovered by children on their own – but the world, indeed, doesn’t work that way. We’re supposed to be brought up to a certain point, and it is inevitable that we instill our values and beliefs in our children, either actively or by example. Religion may be easier than some things to avoid – but Dawkins might be fairly asked to show how the teaching of religion leads to more people being and staying religious than there would otherwise be; are there more believers converted to atheism in their older age or more atheists converted to believers? Dawkins’s message is fine by me, but he’s off base if he thinks there’s any chance this could come about.
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But he never does say, “It shouldn’t be enforced.” The question is left hanging. He does say that teaching children certain religious dogmas is “child abuse”, which is a loaded term. Since the government does intervene to stop child abuse and most people agree that this is right, the most logical conclusion would be that he does want to call in the cops.
(I apologize for taking so long to respond to all the points in this thread. My internet access is limited right now. I do intend to go back and make replies to as much of the debate as I can.)
He addresses this several times with examples like the teapot specialists and the Reformed Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It would be like me saying to you, ‘Since you have not read the scripture of our Lord Spaghetti Monster you therefore are not qualified to comment on his existence’.
But likewise he doesn’t say “It should be enforced”. This book is essentially a sermon for him; and he certainly doesn’t seem to shy away from saying things he believes are true but that would not be popular. Like you say, he says teaching children particular religious dogma is “child abuse” - I don’t see him as a person who’d carefully shy away from crossing a line. If he wanted stopping particular teachings of religious belief enforced, I don’t see any reason he wouldn’t say so. I would say the most logical conclusion is that if he had more to say on the subject, he would say it, especially when he doesn’t really seem to mind potentially pissing people off.
No worries.